The Artist’s Institute / Tamar Ettun / Six Months In / and more

Madeline Hollander, Sean Raspet, Sam Lewitt at The Artist’s Institute

132 East 65th Street
New York, NY

Through May 25
Opening Reception: February 13, 6-8pm

Madeline Hollander’s New Max will be performed every Saturday from 2-6pm.

This spring, the Artist’s Institute’s program brings us closer to the surprising, unstable, and powerful capacities of matter. In the physical sciences and economics, we sometimes call this kind of work energetics―the study of the way that energy flows through a system. For the art field, an emphasis on energetics reorients aesthetics to material expression, sometimes a material expression that exceeds that of the artist’s own imagination or will. Through artworks, talks, and other events this spring, the Institute’s fellows are engaging with energy as an animating force. Energy has the capacity to synthesize molecules. Energy heats up a room.

Tamar Ettun, MFASO Lecture

Hunter MFA, Second Floor Flex Space
205 Hudson Street
New York, NY

February 20, 7pm

Amy Butowicz: A Room to Hoist

The Hunter College Project Space is pleased to present an installation of sculpture by Amy Butowicz. A Room to Hoist brings together a collection of anthropomorphized objects forming assorted bodies from ceramic, found objects, and manipulated canvas. Through the creation of these objects Butowicz engages in the acts of dressing and decorating. As these pieces are treated with glaze, stain, paint, and wallpaper, her work poses questions of revealing and concealment to both contrast and beautify their original form. By decorating decrepit objects, Butowicz contemplates bodily degeneration and the human impulse to conceal the abject.

Visitors will need to get a “guest pass” from the main entrance at Hunter College on the corner of 68th St. and Lexington Ave. You may then use any entrance to reach the Thomas Hunter Project Space, located in the basement of the Thomas Hunter Building (930 Lexington Ave.)

Action at Distance: On the Elusive Quality of Artworks in the Age of Simultaneity

The aesthetics of contemporary art have long been governed by what may be called a performative paradigm, valuing the immediacy of co-presence, the effectiveness of action by contact, or the spectator’s embodied engagement in various forms. Even the element of remote action introduced by certain installation practices—in the wake of land art or media art—can be viewed as a complication rather than a departure from this general orientation. There is always the possibility of incorporating a measure of separation within embodied communication (Art by Telephone), a measure of delay within simultaneity (as Dan Graham taught us, among others), just as niches of void and silence can be carved out in the midst of a buzzing world. But what if distant simultaneity is considered from the outset as the obverse of co-presence, rather than an extension of its natural scope or a loosening of its grip? What if to be simultaneous with the event of art implies the interruption or severance of all proximal communication in favour of a rigorous discipline of action at a distance?

At a moment of much debate about the status of global contemporary art, this exhibition examines how artworks drawn from the contemporary collection of Patricia Phelps de Cisneros navigate this complex issue by embracing appropriative strategies for making art. The appropriative act enables the artists in this exhibition to confound conventions of time and space and question narratives of history, art, and progress. By repeating and copying art historical and archival sources, literary texts, and objects made far away and long ago, they collapse distance as near and far or “here” and “there.” In one way or another, all these artists are intervening, inserting themselves, repeating some type of source. If they are all devoted to repeating already extant works and images, they are also dedicated to exploring the cracks, the potential veins of growth and expansion, exploration and discovery, that always existed within the “originals.”